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( Most notable for me is Peter van Inwagen, a former professor of mine who, in addition to being one of the most prominent Christian philosophers alive, sponsored my confirmation into the Episcopal Church.) The biblical view of the afterlife is an embodied one in which we are resurrected, not one spent as immaterial spirits, and so seems to me to be basically neutral between substance physicalism and substance dualism. Plenty of orthodox Christian philosophers reject substance dualism in favor of the view that we are material objects of some sort.
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It’s often thought that Christians, as such, are somehow doctrinally committed to the claim that human beings possess immaterial souls. A Quick Theological Pointīefore beginning the argument, I will note a theological point. So are you, and so are the other conscious animals. However, I am going to argue in the next two posts that I am in fact a non-physical soul (or, if one prefers, am composed of a non-physical soul and a physical body–though it will become clear in the next post why I don’t like this formulation). As I mentioned before, this form of mere property dualism would be enough to get the argument from consciousness for theism off the ground (for reasons we’ll see later). It is compatible with what I have argued so far that we are material objects (our brains, say, or our bodies) which also happen to possess a special set of non-physical properties. As I said in my first post, experiences are experienced by a subject, and learning the non-physical nature of our experiences does not immediately tell us the nature of the selves which have these experiences.
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So far, I have not addressed what kind of things we are. I argued that consciousness was not reducible to physical phenomena. In the last post, I argued for property dualism.